Housemade: How L.A.’s Sqirl packs maximum delight into every bite

So
they can deliver maximum delight in every bite, the Sqirl team fights your
tongue’s tendency to zone out by embedding a rainbow of flavorful stimuli
inside every bowl of stewed legumes and on top of every slab of brioche. The
result is like something out of a steampunk fantasy: a rustic, lo-fi surface
concealing intricate gears and widgets that tick and whirr within.

Photo: Illustration by Christina Chung

Welcome to Housemade, a column by culinary scientist Ali Bouzari. Here, we take diners on a guided tour of the silent science, brilliant ideas and awesome techniques behind your favorite restaurant menus.

At Sqirl, just west of Silver Lake in Los Angeles, Jessica Koslow and her team draw a line-out-the-door flood of guests for breakfast and lunch. Sqirl’s menu features salads, toasts, rice bowls, pastries and egg dishes cultured from an array of beloved peasant food traditions.

Koslow’s rendering of comfort food stands among the best restaurants in the country because she and her cooks are masters at keeping an audience’s attention. Our brains instinctively lose interest in anything consistent — like the smell of your own skin or the sight of your nose in the corner of your eye — in order to pay attention to that which is new or different, a phenomenon called sensory adaptation. As you work your way through a heaping bowl of pasta or porridge, this evolutionary quirk, originally designed to keep us on the lookout for danger, gradually turns the volume down on taste, texture and aroma if they remain the same with each bite. Traditional comfort food is comforting, in part, because the steady sensation of sameness lulls your brain into quiet autopilot.

To deliver maximum delight in every bite, Koslow, her chef de cuisine Mathew Posternak and their crew fight your tongue’s tendency to zone out by embedding a rainbow of flavorful stimuli inside every bowl of stewed legumes and on top of every slab of brioche. The result is like something out of a steampunk fantasy: a rustic, lo-fi surface concealing intricate gears and widgets that tick and whir within.

All fried potatoes host a tug-of-war between sugar, which causes browning, and starch, which facilitates crispiness. The secret to the best tater tots, hash browns and home fries is tipping the balance toward starch. Sqirl starts its tots by thoroughly rinsing shredded Russian banana potatoes to wash away the sugary juice that seeps to the surface. Removing burning-prone sugars buys more time for the starchy shreds to bubble and crisp in contact with hot fat, and Koslow instructs her cooks to compensate for any starch lost during washing by adding pure potato starch back into the mix. They fry this precisely staged amalgam in clarified butter — unadulterated butterfat liberated from the corruptive influence of burnable dairy sugars and proteins — which mirrors the washed potato pulp.

To keep these plate-size tots from becoming one-note monoliths, Sqirl weaves the potato strands together with horseradish, fresh dill and ground nigella seeds to create a tapestry of taste and aroma. By first contracting bacteria to imbue the horseradish with lactic acid during a weeklong ferment in salt brine, Sqirl embeds the same acidic tang that we crave in sour cream with latkes and in vinegar with chips.

The salad that sits atop each tot tastes like one of Koslow’s cooks shot it out of a confetti cannon, in the best way. No two bites are the same, and the texture and aroma contrast between a torn leaf of chervil, a shaved raw parsnip or a piece of roasted eggplant doused in berbere vinaigrette resets your brain’s short attention span with every forkful.

At their core, cream cheese and ketchup contain a jumble of carbs, proteins and fat diluted with water. Sqirl uses the fragrant smoke from burning plum wood to build sensory intrigue into the Marcona almonds and plum-tomato mixture that forms the dry foundations of its schmear and ketchup. The desiccating heat of the smoker drives flavorless water out, leaving more room for salted lemon juice, heady olive oil and fresh chives in the schmear and verjus, and chile powder in the ketchup.

Before serving, Koslow dusts the tot with charred scallion ash, inlaying a final touch of sulfurous, nutty filigree into a potato pancake as complex as a carved jewelry box.

Shakpeas with toasted baguette, known in the restaurant as long toast, at Sqirl in Los Angeles.

The trick to restaurant-quality one-pot meals sounds like heresy: You need more than one pot. Over the course of hours simmering together in a single vessel, ingredients lose their individuality. Their tasty components migrate and mingle to form heavier, darker alloys, and their characteristic aromas vanish from the bubbling surface. Textures also sink toward a mushy medium as carbs soften and proteins unwind.

Long-cooked flavors are deep and delicious, but dishes where every ingredient melts into the background can feel like listening to a song through the muffled boom of a subwoofer in someone else’s car. By cooking components of a one-pot meal like shakshuka separately and marrying them at the last moment, Sqirl delivers the satisfying low notes that we crave while preserving the high tones that keep us hooked.

Sqirl starts its shakpeas by cooking black-eyed peas, chickpeas and other legumes in stock made from mirepoix. To cut through the generic veggieness, Koslow’s crew adds ginger flamed with a torch until fragrant oil bubbles to the surface, and fistfuls of bay leaves. Once they are tender, the legumes are chilled and stored in their cooking liquid, allowing more time for the bay aroma and nerve-tingling ginger oil to migrate inward.

Next, the cooks jam pans full of San Marzano tomatoes and fresh thyme into the smoker. Several glugs of olive oil in each pan act like a fatty butterfly net to ensnare as much of the elusive, oil-loving aroma of burning plum wood as possible. Separately, the cooks sweat onions and garlic with a spice mix of fenugreek, paprika, coriander, black pepper, dill seed, mustard seed and lactofermented jalapeños and leeks. When the mixture sheds enough water to become a loose jam, they rehydrate and deglaze the pan with the smoked tomato pulp and its juices.

Koslow cools and combines this sofrito base with the peas and their cooking liquid to age in the refrigerator, giving the two mixtures time to exchange ideas, without either becoming a complete flavor convert.

To order, Sqirl’s line cooks ladle the pea-sofrito mixture into cast-iron pans, add two raw eggs and top with braised greens before baking in the oven. In addition to cooking the eggs, the oven’s brief burst of dry heat crowns the bubbling mixture with a pebbled skin of extra-concentrated sofrito naturally packed with savory MSG from the tomatoes.

Out of the oven, Koslow’s crew garnishes the skillets with purslane, mustard frill or whatever other crisp greens they received from their favorite farmers that day, along with ground urfa chiles and hulba, a fenugreek condiment.

Most seeds contain a stash of sticky carbs that absorb and hold moisture to secure a steady water supply for a sprouting seedling. Sqirl coaxes that webby system into action by soaking whole fenugreek seeds in water overnight. When the swollen seeds are blended with olive oil and preserved lime or lemon, those dissolved carbs capture thousands of tiny air bubbles that allow the hulba to float atop the shakpeas in vivid streaks rather than sinking inward.

Each order comes with a piece of toasted baguette known in the restaurant as long toast. Every morning, one of the Sqirl prep cooks cuts a stack of baguettes tip to tip in delicate tranches to be toasted under the salamander. Just when your brain becomes bored of the spoon, this elongated edible utensil awaits.

Hangover fare sits on an especially decadent pedestal within the pantheon of comfort food. Koslow, Posternak and pastry chef Sasha Piligian designed the layers of this sandwich to provide the necessary dose of fatty, starchy salve for those in need, while providing enough entertainment to keep the rest of us engaged.

Most breakfast sandwiches sit on bland, factory-standard rolls or croissants. Piligian tricks out the Sqirl bun like a Bond car with surprises in every compartment. She cuts some of the standard all-purpose flour with whole grain spelt flour to package the nutty complexity of whole grain into the delicate texture of a white flour bun. Piligian boosts a multifaceted sourdough starter with a dose of instant yeast for another best-of-both-worlds combination of leavening power and aroma. The sprouted quinoa folded into the dough contains a microscopic enzyme factory that modifies and tinkers with the proteins and carbs in the bun as it ferments. The explosive mixture of sweet, savory, nutty bits and pieces thrown out of this tiny factory rests within a rich combination of eggs, milk and butter mixed in toward the end of the process to create a brioche dough with rocket launchers under the hood.

After shaping and proofing the dough into rolls, Piligian brushes the buns with egg, nigella, white sesame and big flakes of Maldon salt. After baking, the Sqirl cooks cut and griddle each bun to order.

Koslow and her cooks add several layers of built-from-scratch components to the concealed gadgetry of the bun. In place of mayo, Sqirl features strained Straus yogurt mixed with fresh cucumber, dill, mint, lactofermented jalapeño hot sauce and house-made creme fraiche.

Next, they use the active cultures in the whey that are left over from the strained yogurt to jump-start a batch of fermented lentils. The Sqirl team toasts the soaked, fermented lentils with a sofrito of onion, garlic, black garlic, fresh thyme, roasted porcini mushroom powder and chile de arbol. They deglaze the mixture with Sherry and cook the lentils risotto-style, stirring and adding additional liquid in the form of more whey from house-made ricotta and vegetable stock. They blend half of the cooked lentils to a creamy, hummus-like texture and combine it with the other half to stud the spread with perfectly cooked lentil bites.

To prevent palate fatigue amid all of the decadent creaminess, Sqirl stacks each sandwich with crispy chicken skins. Koslow ensures maximum crispiness by simmering the skin in a pan to untangle the knotty mass of raw proteins that make undercooked chicken skin rubbery. Once fully rendered, Sqirl chicken skins receive a dusting of nigella, smoked habanero powder and salt, followed by an overnight rest in a dehydrator to drive off the last bits of moisture with no risk of burning.

In place of a sage-scented puck of nondescript protein, the Sqirl turkey sausage carries all of the spiced intrigue of good souvlaki. The key ingredient, along with a freshly ground mixture of turkey thigh and breast, is a depth charge of long-cooked flavor from yet another sofrito. This one consists of onion, preserved Meyer lemon, nigella, Aleppo chile powder, fresh and dried Greek oregano and arbol, cooked start to finish immersed in a pan of olive oil in the smoker.

The last level, a fried egg with red chile, salt and an herb salad of parsley, dill, tarragon and chives, completes a dish with all of the hearty appeal of a diner gut-buster that feels lighter because of the nonstop parade of sensory spectacle.

Jessica Koslow refuses to rest on the laurels of her best-selling cookbook, “Everything I Want to Eat: Sqirl and the New California Cooking.” Koslow has a uniquely profound understanding of the balance between our love of comfort and our demand for constant stimulation, so while others strive to replicate her most famous creations, she’s always on the hunt for the next thing.